Mississippian Mortuary Practices

Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective

Edited by Lynne P. Sullivan and Robert C. Mainfort Jr.

Publication Year: 2010

The residents of Mississippian towns principally located in the southeastern and midwestern United States from 900 to1500 A.D. made many beautiful objects, which included elaborate and well-crafted copper and shell ornaments, pottery vessels, and stonework. Some of these objects were socially valued goods and often were placed in ritual context, such as graves.

The funerary context of these artifacts has sparked considerable study and debate among archaeologists, raising questions about the place in society of the individuals interred with such items, as well as the nature of the societies in which these people lived.

By focusing on how mortuary practices serve as symbols of beliefs and values for the living, the contributors to Mississippian Mortuary Practices explore how burial of the dead reflects and reinforces the cosmology of specific cultures, the status of living participants in the burial ceremony, ongoing kin relationships, and other aspects of social organization.

Cover

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

The mortuary practices of the Mississippi Period have been instrumental
in inspiring archaeological interpretations of late prehistoric cultures in the
southeastern and midwestern United States. The well-crafted artwork often
interred with individuals of this time period and other evidence of complex
societies, ...

1. Mississippian Mortuary Practices and the Quest for Interpretation

Mississippian Period (ca. A.D. 900–1500) native peoples in the southeastern
and midwestern United States are known for towns that typically include
platform mounds and plazas and for elaborate and well-crafted copper and
shell ornaments, pottery vessels, and stonework. Some of these objects were
socially valued goods ...

2. The Missing Persons in Mississippian Mortuaries

Mortuary studies in archaeology frequently focus on inferring the function
or meaning of some burial program in society. The results, I believe, are often
inconclusive or deceptive, since the procedure typically involves assuming
that a single purpose, meaning, or mortuary program resulted in the material
remains excavated. ...

3. Cosmological Layouts of Secondary Burials as Political Instruments

Secondary burials offer a fertile field for research that has barely been tapped.
The very diversity of secondary burial treatments allow us cultural insights
that offer surprising rewards when coupled with fresh analytical perspectives.
When we reflect on the deep and myriad cultural connections that bones have ...

4. Multiple Groups, Overlapping Symbols, and the Creation of a Sacred Space at Etowah’s Mound C

There is a long tradition in the in the scholarship on the Southeast to interpret
mortuary treatment as a way to understand ranking systems and the social
status of individuals. This tradition is based on the presumption of a direct
relationship between investment in mortuary treatment and social status ...

5. Social and Spatial Dimensions of Moundville Mortuary Practices

Moundville has an impressive mortuary data set with a long history of related
investigations. Previous mortuary studies, however, have not focused on
individual burial clusters as socially and spatially relevant units of analysis.
Here we address this issue by documenting and interpreting the size, arrangement, ...

6. Aztalan Mortuary Practices Revisited

The Aztalan site (47JE1) sits on the banks of the Crawfish River in Jefferson
County, Wisconsin, between the modern cities of Milwaukee and Madison
(see Figure 6.1). The site has been protected as a state park for more than 50
years. While several occupations have been discovered at this multicomponent
site, ...

7. Mississippian Dimensions of a Fort Ancient Mortuary Program: The Development of Authority and Spatial Grammar at SunWatch Village

Interregional studies have long been hampered by essentialist categories,
which are attributable in archaeology to cultural-historical frameworks designed
for other purposes (Dunnell 1971; Essenpreis 1978; Hart and Brumbach
2003; Pauketat 2001b; Lyman and O’Brien 1998). Several researchers of Fort
Ancient evolution ...

Funerary rites are, of course, one sort of ritual. A key characteristic of rituals
is that they are performed repeatedly within a time-honored structure.
The performance of rituals as prescribed by tradition essentially constitutes
an acknowledgment of the authority of the respected ancestors who passed
down ...

9. The Materialization of Status and Social Structure at Koger’s Island Cemetery, Alabama

The explanatory frameworks used to interpret the mortuary practices of Mississippian
societies have undergone a significant amount of change within the
last 35 years. Early mortuary studies of these societies relied heavily on the
socio-evolutionary typologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Fried 1967;
Service 1962) ...

10. Pecan Point as the “Capital” of Pacaha: A Mortuary Perspective

Many years ago, the Pecan Point site attained near-legendary status among
professional and avocational archaeologists. It is not the size of the site or
its mounds (both of which are poorly documented) that made Pecan Point
of such interest but rather the large collections of mortuary ceramics from
the site. ...

11. Mound Construction and Community Changes within the Mississippian Community at Town Creek

The Mississippian Period was a time of significant political and social change
within the native communities of the southeastern United States (Griffin 1985:
63; Smith 1986b: 56–63; Steponaitis 1986: 388–391). Political changes within
Mississippian societies included increases in power and authority for community
leaders ...

12. Mortuary Practices and Cultural Identity at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century in Eastern Tennessee

Culturally ascribed identity groups “are based on the expression of a real or
assumed shared culture and common descent” (Jones 1997: 84). Cultural identity
can be correlated with suites of cultural practices or traditions, especially
those related to ritual and symbolic practices (Beck 1995), and those that differentiate
...

13. The Mortuary Assemblage from the Holliston Mills Site, a Mississippian Town in Upper East Tennessee

After extensive archaeological investigations at Phipps Bend on the Holston
River in upper East Tennessee, Lafferty (1981: 520) concluded that “the Mississippian
occupation appears to be quite unintense.” The Mississippian Period in
the area was characterized by small, scattered settlements with no evidence for
corn agriculture. ...

14. Caves as Mortuary Contexts in the Southeast

From early in the history of European settlement in the Southeast, it was observed
that the region’s caves and karsts were used by the ancients as places
for interring the dead. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, discoveries
in the deep caves of Tennessee and Kentucky caught the imagination of the
American intelligentsia, ...

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